The Decline of Morphological Case-marking of Nouns in the Regional Arabic of Iran and Lebanon

In classical Arabic, nearly all of the nouns received relevant case suffixes in every grammatical function (including argument, complement, and adverbial). This article investigates the fate of this rich case-marking system in two contemporary varieties of Arabic, i.e. those of Khuzestan (Iran) and Lebanon. The data were provided through controlled interviews, and in cases by means of exchanging audio files, with six speakers of the varieties (three speakers from each one). Two questionnaires (including 101 questions, altogether) and 14 photos for description were used as the main instruments of data gathering, which lead to a corpus of approximately 800 sentences. The analysis of the corpus data shows no morpheme expressing case distinctions (as opposed to any other morpheme) in the two varieties. Two main mechanisms have been at work in the process of case disappearance: phonetic erosion, and case syncretism. The output of these two mechanisms for singular nouns, irregular (‘broken’) plural, and feminine plural has been the removal of all three short-vowel case markers (nominative, accusative, and genitive); and the output of the second mechanism for masculine regular (‘sound’) plurals has been the functional generalization of oblique case to nominative, and the disappearance of case distinction. On the other hand, the corpus data show that compared to classical Arabic, in both varieties, word order has become more fixed, and the agreement system has become stronger. But based on this investigation, these two grammatical phenomena cannot be claimed to be necessarily the consequences of the decay of case system.